The New YorkerModify

Donald Trump is an editor’s nightmare and a psychiatrist’s dream. Amid all the coverage marking the first anniversary of his return to the White House, one story—which did not get the attention it deserved—stood out for me: a Times analysis of how much more the President has been talking and talking and talking. The findings? One million, nine hundred and seventy-seven thousand, six hundred and nine words in the Presidential appearances, as of January 20th—an increase of two hundred and forty-five per cent compared with the first year of Trump’s first term in office, back in 2017.

There are many conclusions to be drawn from this astonishing statistic, including the obvious one, that our leader loves the sound of his own voice, and the slightly less obvious corollary that he has no one around him willing or able to tell him to shut up. It’s also true that, in rambling on so much, Trump reveals just about everything one could ever want to know about him—his lack of discipline, his ignorance, his vanity, insecurity, and crudeness, and a mean streak that knows no limits. “It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely,” Thomas Mann wrote a century ago in his novel “The Magic Mountain,” set in a sanitarium perched above the Swiss mountain town of Davos, where Trump spent the better part of this week proving to the stunned attendees of the annual World Economic Forum the continuing relevance of Mann’s observation.

“Sometimes, you need a dictator,” Trump soliloquized on Wednesday, during a reception for business leaders. A few hours earlier, in an address that lasted a full hour and a half, the President had announced that he would not invade Greenland, despite his recent threats; explained that “stupid people” buy windmills; and admitted that he had decided to raise tariffs on Switzerland, because its Prime Minister, “a woman,” had “rubbed me the wrong way.” The speech, during which Trump four times referred to Iceland when he meant Greenland, was more than twice the combined length of the addresses of the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. On Tuesday, speaking to the White House press corps to mark the actual anniversary of his return to office, Trump had discoursed on everything from his mother telling him he could have been a Major League baseball player and explaining to him what a mental asylum was to his hatred for Somalia and its “very low-I.Q. people.” That one lasted a hundred and four minutes.

Trump, of course, was rude, untruthful, and excessively, if not quite so egregiously, long-winded in his first term, too. The difference today, as he presides over a cowed American government, whose checks and balances no longer function as they used to, is that his Administration is far more willing and able to turn his fantastical words into tangible realities. The President, it now seems clear, has the world’s most consequential case of untreated logorrhea. (Dictionary definition of this condition: “Excessive and often incoherent talkativeness.”)

And I’m not just referring to the week’s crisis over Greenland and the future of the NATO alliance, a crisis which began and (sort of) ended with many words being uttered by Trump about his “psychological” need to own the vast and strategically located Danish territory. Consider, for example, Trump’s “Board of Peace,” which he débuted before leaving Davos on Thursday morning. In Trump 1.0, perhaps this would have been no more than one of his Twitter controversies, in which he posted some crazy graphic of himself leading a rump group of world powers to overthrow the United Nations as the new permanent chairman of the global board of directors. In Trump 2.0, his alternate reality is not just a social-media post or the subject of an over-my-dead-body fight with his latest panicked national security adviser but an in-person photo op featuring the President, a real-life logo copied from the U.N.’s, and a random assortment of world leaders who were willing to buy a seat on Trump’s committee for a cool billion dollars. (Belarus and Qatar, yes; Britain, France, Germany, and every other major U.S. ally in Europe, no.) I highly recommend watching the fully live-streamed event, a show one might caption “Donald Trump and his pretend League of (Lesser) Superheroes, with himself as a bizarro Superman in charge of the world.”

My favorite moment was when—after bragging about how “everybody wants to be a part of” the board that every other major world leader, with the possible exception of the war-mongering pariah Vladimir Putin, refused to join—he claimed that the group he himself had dreamed up was some distinguished independent organization that had solicited his chairmanship. “I was very honored when they asked me to do it,” he said. For all I know, he believed it.

Perhaps just as revealing, when Trump reached the fulsome self-praise section of his speech, he explained that he was such an incredible peacemaker that he had even managed to end wars in places where he had not known they were happening. Imagine admitting this about yourself. Another quote from “The Magic Mountain” sprang to mind: “I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on. . . .”

A decade into the Trump era, Americans are more or less used to this manic political performance art, proof, if we still needed it, that millions of our fellow-citizens are all right with having a clearly disturbed leader who cannot control what he says. (Although, to be fair, even some partisan Republicans are starting to worry that they could pay a serious price this fall for what the G.O.P. strategist Karl Rove, no fan of Trump’s, called Trump’s unnerving“rambling appearances” and “downward spiral” in his latest Wall Street Journal column, headlined “Is Trump Trying to Lose the Midterms?”)

But the stunned reaction of so many Europeans to a week living in the full-on Trump talk cycle ought to remind us that there’s something to be said for the plainer interpretation of Trump’s out-of-control behavior, even if years of intensive exposure in the U.S. have inured us to it.

“This is a wake-up call, a bigger one than we’ve ever had,” Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, said.

“The time has come to stand up against Trump,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark and secretary-general of NATO, said.

It was only a few days before his speech in Davos, on the eve of his visit to Switzerland, that Trump was revealed to have sent a text to the Prime Minister of Norway, complaining that, because Norway had denied him the Nobel Peace Prize, he was under no obligation to proceed peacefully in his desire to take over Greenland. The message, surely a first in diplomatic annals, began: “Dear Jonas, Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

Lars-Christian Brask, a deputy speaker of the Danish parliament, no doubt spoke for many in Europe when he responded to this evidence of Trump’s “mad and erratic behavior” by asking on television whether the President was still capable of running the United States.

What struck me was how calm, reasonable, and puzzled Brask’s tone was as he said it. But it’s going to be a long three more years; there’s almost certainly going to be a lot of shouting before this is all over. How many polite ways, after all, are there to ask whether the President of the United States has lost his mind? ♦

The glass in this year’s Oscar nominations is more than half full. There’s always much to complain about (just wait), but the Academy did itself proud by recognizing the year’s best film, “Sinners,” in a record sixteen categories and giving multiple nominations to several other superb films, including “Marty Supreme” and “One Battle After Another.” Hollywood did unusually well this year with these big-budget, large-scale movies of unusually forthright and complex substance, and it’s a pleasant surprise to see the Academy respond enthusiastically to them. Or, to put it differently, they’re spectacular films, which helped to get their unusual elements through the gates. The same holds for the Brazilian film “The Secret Agent,” which takes daring dramatic leaps through time and plays subtly intricate yet deadly earnest games with its protagonist’s identity; it’s also a teeming, large-scale thriller, and the Academy paid attention to its multidimensional inventiveness.

In other words, it’s a year in which, unexpectedly, what’s great is also popular, and that’s a combination that Oscar-land finds hard to resist. Most of the year’s best films confront power in its many forms, especially political power, and the nominations reflect the Academy’s acknowledgment that this is the topic of the moment. This acknowledgment, however, is as much a matter of aesthetics as of politics: messaging alone counts for little, because method, form, and style are inextricable from ideas and ideologies, from the way in which principles are realized.

It’s particularly heartening to see the New York independent filmmaker Josh Safdie enter the club, with “Marty Supreme”—and all the more so to hear his name called alongside that of his co-writer and co-editor Ronald Bronstein. (The film got nine nominations.) Actually, this year’s Oscars is, among other things, a part of the Bronstein Industrial Complex: Rose Byrne is also nominated, for Best Actress, for her performance in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” directed by Mary Bronstein, who is married to Ronald. For the record, Ronald’s one feature to date as a director, “Frownland,” is the most important independent film of the century so far, not least, for its casting of nonprofessional actors in major roles and its development of their artistry in dramatic scenes of emotional extremes.

The nominees for this year’s new award, for casting, feature three films—“Marty Supreme,” “One Battle After Another,” and “The Secret Agent”—which similarly include nonprofessionals in prominent roles. (Ronald himself, a nonprofessional actor, starred in Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2009 feature “Daddy Longlegs.”) In “Marty Supreme,” Safdie and Bronstein sustain, sharpen, and intensify the same tone of New York tension and aggression, struggle and desperation that marks their previous work. The same goes for Mary, whose one previous feature, “Yeast,” from 2008—in which she starred alongside Greta Gerwig—is a big New York showcase for acting with a frenetic, explosive edge.

On the other hand, if the year’s best nominees are brash and sharp-edged, the Academy also coated the year’s list with sentimental goo, starting with “Sentimental Value,” “Hamnet,” and “Train Dreams.” It’s unpleasant to note that wonderful actors have been ill-served in these films. Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” about the fate of a family house amid the conflicts between a film-director patriarch and his two daughters (one an actress), is a middlebrow, middle-class, midrange view of the artistic world that its characters implausibly inhabit. The blandness starts with its images and affects its performances, too. Similarly, in “Hamnet,” subjectivity is downplayed into plot points, the story’s mystical ferocity is underplayed, the domestic melodrama is by the numbers, and the climactic tear-jerking is just mugging for the camera. As for “Train Dreams,” it dilutes barely enough information and ideas for a short film over a lugubrious and portentous hundred minutes of ostensibly pretty but textureless images. If people in the old days really talked so slowly and dully, more would have died of boredom than of disease.

There’s also a kind of garish showiness that the Academy isn’t immune to. I wasn’t much more enamored of “Sirāt,” a notable disappointment given the greatness of its director’s first feature, “You All Are Captains.” The new film puts empty characters (their tattoos are more expressive than the dialogue they’re given) into dangerous situations and dispatches them with all the empty pleasure of video-game kills. (The electro score, by Kangding Ray, however, is impressive: immersive and pummelling. Unfortunately, it wasn’t nominated.) Emma Stone is among my favorite current actors, yet she has hitched her wagon to a tendentious, numbingly cartoonish set of films by Yorgos Lanthimos, including “Bugonia,” which elicit flamboyant performances that win acclaim and awards but aren’t deepening her art. His films offer his actors no mirror effect, no room or need for introspection.

I’m shocked, if not surprised, that there was no recognition for “Hedda,” with its performances by Tessa Thompson and Nina Hoss (or for its screenplay, an ingenious revision of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler”), or for “Highest 2 Lowest” and its lead actor, Denzel Washington. And it’s a shame that Josh O’Connor went unacknowledged for “The Mastermind.” Nonetheless, in a year in which the studios came through to a remarkable extent and produced some movies of extraordinary artistry on a spectacular scale, the intersection of the art and the business of cinema is uncommonly strong. Despite the many problems that the film business is facing—declining attendance for realistic dramas, competition from streaming, the menace of A.I., and merger fever—the hunger for the art of movies, from inside the business itself, offers a welcome glimmer of that most old-timey of Hollywood sentiments: hope.

The winners I’d pick are below in bold, followed by the rest of my preferred nominees in alphabetical order.

Best Picture

Properly understood, the very notion of bestness reflects a view of much more than the year’s movies. What makes a movie the best isn’t just an act of judgment but also of imagination: how it will look in the rearview mirror of cinema history, how it will shape the future of the art. Among the many virtues of “Sinners”—alongside its fusion of genres and tones, of intimate moments and grand design, of big ideas and big emotions—is the way its spectacular action maps onto myth and history. “Marty Supreme,” by contrast, points to myth and history but, because of its exhilaratingly hectic pace, has to leave them merely signified rather than explored. Still, if “Sinners” doesn’t win, I’d be delighted if “Marty Supreme” did. Its speed marks a fruitful crisis in Josh Safdie’s style (it plays more like an endgame than a new start) but its crowded constellation of idiosyncrasies makes it an emblem of advanced aestheticism—a rare quality in cinema.

Except, of course, in the world of Wes Anderson, who goes from strength to strength so consistently that his uniquely cultivated symbolic power and sensuous audacity is often taken for granted. “The Phoenician Scheme” brilliantly pairs its foreground and its background but keeps a little air between the characters and the ideas (maybe because the story has a connection to Anderson’s actual family history). “The Mastermind,” the year’s most exquisite film, is profoundly alert to its protagonist’s existential disaffection, but leaves the specifics of his milieu untouched, whereas, in “Highest 2 Lowest,” milieu is everything; Spike Lee, remaking Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low,” manages to improve on the original by fully realizing the protagonist’s world (here, the music business) and taking its aesthetic and cultural politics seriously. “Misericordia” is an inside-out mystery, a local thriller of crime and punishment that exists in an ideas-world of its own, springing from its director Alain Guiraudie’s decades-long imagining of the chthonic pansexuality of rural life. “One Battle After Another” creates a revolutionary mythology only to ruefully debunk it, but its occasional slide into satire has the odd effect of subordinating its big ideas to an action film, however thrillingly accomplished. “The Secret Agent” offers a sense of history unfolding that’s unmatched in this year’s movies, and “Hedda,” in updating and revising Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” offers a critical sense of literary history the likes of which I’ve rarely seen in any film. But “Sinners” is the year’s most comprehensive movie, the one that offers the best argument against artificial boundaries and for putting everything in.

Directing

First, the legally required boilerplate: by definition, the best movie of the year is the one that’s directed the best. Last year, I made the case for separating the two honors for the pleasure of spreading the love and the prizes between two different films, two different filmmakers. This heretical policy gets some support from yet another rigid convention, that of credits, which separates directors from screenwriters. Still, this year, most of my favorite films are the works of hyphenates—directors who also wrote, or co-wrote, the scripts—and so it takes some analytical work and poetic appreciation to isolate the art of directing in the year’s best films.

Ryan Coogler, as the creator of “Sinners,” is, in an overarching way, the year’s best director. On the other hand, “The Mastermind” is a different kind of movie, intimately scaled even in its action scenes, low on digital effects, and high on long takes in close settings. Throughout, its director, Kelly Reichardt, transforms scenes of the sort that are so often filmed in a neutral style, yielding a mere record of the scripted action, into finely calibrated and mercurially complex interactions—even for a single character alone on a ladder or handling a box filled with paintings. In so doing, she embodies the idea of direction as immediate on-set creation achieved through the basic tools of cinema, an idea that is here exalted and revitalized.

Acting: Performance by an actor in a leading role.

The acting categories are, in a way, painful to write about, on the premise that there are basically no bad actors, only bad directors. The question is often asked: But don’t actors have agency? Avoiding the temptation to answer, “No, usually just an agent,” I’d say that, if a given performance seriously elicits that question, then the serious answer must be “Either too much or too little.” That usually happens when an actor appears overly controlled or insufficiently guided—either sealed tight or unhinged. With great performances, the results prove the merits of the film’s making—and the balance of the director-actor relationship.

Just different enough and just enough alike: such are Michael B. Jordan’s two performances as the twins in “Sinners,” which show a delicate calibration of the physical and mental force in each character. He’s responsive to far more than the events at hand, always attuned to the characters’ pasts, to the dangerously pressurized world around them, and to their visions of the future. It’s an extraordinary demonstration of thought in action—and it’s this expressive factor that puts it a cut above that of Josh O’Connor in “The Mastermind.” There the physical finesse and the slow burns of comedy and tragedy are built into Kelly Reichardt’s discerning direction, but the character’s wider spectrum of experience is filtered out of the script (the price of refinement), which keeps O’Connor’s performance within narrower confines than Jordan’s in “Sinners.”

Denzel Washington is, in real life, at the top of the movie industry exactly as his character in “Highest 2 Lowest” is at the summit of the music business, and he infuses the role with an imaginative sense of swagger and command, which makes the tottering of the character’s empire all the more poignant. (It also adds an element of ambiguity, even ambivalence, to the movie’s fresh-start ending.) Yet, strangely, the starriest performance this year is also, by definition, a more elusive one—that of Wagner Moura, in “The Secret Agent,” playing a man on the run who is forced to change his identity in order to keep a step ahead of the dictatorial Brazilian authorities. In effect, the role is that of an actor, and Moura’s charisma and that of his character converge. This creates both enormous empathy and (because, wherever he is, he stands out) enormous danger. The spotlight that comes from within is too strong to be dimmed. Moura fills the frame and bursts from it just as his character bursts out of his immediate milieu into history.

It pains me not to have a sixth slot for Ethan Hawke, for his self-transformative and self-effacing incarnation of the lyricist Lorenz Hart, in “Blue Moon.” He seems not to play the role but to channel Hart. On the other hand, despite the resistance I’ve felt to the prodigious Timothée Chalamet’s gee-whiz performances to date, his turn in “Marty Supreme” is astonishing and inspired, because it sublimates the habitual overeagerness of his style into substance. Chalamet has been aptly ambitious beneath his theatre-kid charm, and this is the first movie where he conveys the hunger of adult concerns, however callow and reckless the character he plays may be. Still, the action never slows down enough to allow the protagonist—or the actor—a moment for reflection.

Acting: Performance by an actress in a leading role

This is the easiest category to choose, for one happy reason and one unhappy one. The happy one: Thompson’s acerbic and assertive Hedda, firmly in synch with the director Nia DaCosta’s bold approach to Ibsen’s play, stands high above the competition for its combination of rhetorical flair, heated passion, and melodramatic command. And I had little hesitation about Thompson’s co-nominees. Rose Byrne’s high-pressure frenzy in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” comes closest in its own sharp-angled, cubistic variety. Susan Chardy, in “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” calmly conjures the agonized force of long-suppressed trauma and the effort to concentrate that force into principled action. (She would have got this recognition a year earlier had the movie been released in 2024, as originally planned.) Callie Hernandez, who co-wrote “Invention” and based its story on her late father (complete with copious archival documentation of his unusual life), plays a character close to herself yet fictionalized enough to lend the drama significant symbolic weight, turning a local manipulator into an avatar of historical transformation. As for Dakota Johnson, the widespread repudiation of “Materialists” has been one of my movie-year peeves; “Past Lives,” the previous feature by its writer and director, Celine Song, was widely acclaimed even though (or, I suspect, because) it effaces the practical and, um, material basis for its romantic drama. In “Materialists,” Song doesn’t stint on sentiment, but she also digs deep into the money matters and other worldly considerations that color it. Johnson, whose impulsively thoughtful way with dialogue is one of the delights of recent cinema, invigorates the movie with her mercurial energy.

Now the unhappy reason—indeed, two. First, one of the best performances of 2025 was by Agnès Jaoui, who was involutedly neurotic, whimsically effervescent, painfully afflicted, and daringly free, in Sophie Fillières’s “This Life of Mine,” but the film is still unreleased here. (I caught it at one of a handful of special screenings.) Second, the competition hasn’t been as plentiful as it should have been. Not enough movies offered women leading roles as substantial as what men got. The same was true last year; at the time, I suspected it was a mere happenstance of production schedules, but now, I think it’s a trend, and I believe that there’s a wider reason for it: the resurgence of unchallenged misogyny. The marketing and positioning of actresses in their roles is tougher than it’s been in recent years because of the insult machinery of man-boy social media and its echoes across society more widely. I think this causes some filmmakers to inhibit their actresses, or to turn substantial actresses blatantly showy. The resulting movies, tailored to appeal rather than to challenge, stick their exceptionally talented actors into well-established grooves (sentiment, neatness, flamboyance). They can still feature performances that win acclaim but they don’t advance the art of acting or that of individual actors. (Reminder: the problem is not at all to do with the actresses’ artistry but with how movies are directed.)

Acting: Performance by an actress in a supporting role

The year’s hardest category: I wish there were eight statuettes to give out. Here, too, DaCosta’s reconfiguration of Ibsen, by making Hedda Gabler’s former lover (and her husband’s main professional rival) a woman, and by greatly expanding that role, offers Nina Hoss a showcase for intellectual passion and romantic frenzy. The performance, like the role itself, would be disastrous were it not simultaneously supremely commanding yet grievously defenseless. Hoss inhabits the part completely, and in so doing she transforms the history of the play and clinches DaCosta’s improvement on Ibsen. Meanwhile, if the prize were awarded for power per second of screentime, Gaby Hoffmann, playing a nineteen-sixties dropout in survival mode, would win; her furious silence is as eloquent as her terse determination, and her voice, quietly oracular, is one of the most memorable things in the movie.

Tânia Maria, in “The Secret Agent,” delivers a performance that’s in an altogether separate category. A rug-maker by profession, she met the director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, in 2019, when he was looking for extras in rural Brazil for his film “Bacurau.” In his new film, she plays a far more extensive role, as an elderly leftist sympathizer who runs a safe house for the politically persecuted—a den mother of resistance whose words, wry and wise and salty, spring from a deep well of horrific experience. Mendonça initially chose Maria for her voice, and her voice, in a few dozen lines, dominates the film. Finally, tough to choose between Gwyneth Paltrow and Odessa A’zion in “Marty Supreme”; they’re both screen-filling, in different ways. Paltrow, in her first major non-Marvel role in a decade, plays a former star coming out of early retirement with exultant grandeur and aching vulnerability. A’zion, as the protagonist’s married lover, who can match his manipulative wiles beat for beat, conveys an exciting, bittersweet sense of the wheels turning beneath deceptive surfaces.

Acting: Performance by an actor in a supporting role

One of Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterstrokes in “One Battle After Another” was to cast Benicio del Toro as the character of Sensei Sergio St. Carlos—and to be so sure of del Toro’s centrality to the film that the shoot was stopped for two and a half months while the actor was busy starring in “The Phoenician Scheme.” Much of the role was conceived by del Toro, who also shaped the crucial concluding segment in which his character appears. Anderson, in other words, brought in an actor as a main collaborator, which is why this supporting role is nearly a lead. Even without knowing about this element of the film’s production (and I didn’t when I saw the film), it is impossible to miss del Toro’s inventive power.

John Magaro’s voice in “The Mastermind” is still echoing through my mind, not only because it’s a distinctive voice but also because it conveys an enormous burden of mixed emotions—friendship, responsibility, love, and desperate fear of an unnamed past catching up with him. In “Sinners,” Delroy Lindo brings passion and wit to the role of an elder bluesman, and delivers the movie’s central monologue with tragic Shakespearean majesty. In “Blue Moon,” Andrew Scott, as the composer Richard Rodgers—whose success with the première of “Oklahoma!” is shadowed by a painful encounter with his troubled former collaborator, the Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke)—renders a simple role poignantly complex, capturing the composer’s practical solidity, compassionate tact, and fierce pride. As for Kevin O’Leary, if he weren’t already well known as a reality-TV panelist, he’d be recognized more plainly for the etched-in-stone authority of his performance in “Marty Supreme,” as a raging tycoon who’s both benefactor and nemesis.

Casting

This is the first year that the Academy is giving an award for casting, and the timing is perfect, because it’s a branch of filmmaking which has been exceptionally distinguished this year. One of the most cheering movie phenomena of 2025 is the prevalence of nonprofessional actors mingling freely with stars, as in “Marty Supreme,” “One Battle After Another,” and “The Secret Agent.” As for “Eephus,” there are no stars at all; instead there are pros and amateurs on and around the baseball field where the movie takes place, including the independent-film luminaries Keith Poulson and Theodore Bouloukos, the “Uncut Gems” alumni Keith William Richards and Wayne Diamond, the longtime baseball announcer Joe Castiglione, and the retired baseball player Bill (Spaceman) Lee. “Peter Hujar’s Day,” meanwhile, is not only one of the year’s best adapted screenplays, it also has a cast—of just two, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, as the titular photographer and the writer who asks him about his day—who inhabit their characters—and the 1974 setting—with fierce attention and mischievous freedom.

International Feature Film

The Academy’s system in this category is misguided, and not only because its nominees come not from the Academy itself but from official boards from individual countries, but also because nominees in the category can include films that haven’t yet been released here. (The documentary category has the same problem.) That said, international filmmaking is in feeble shape, partly because of the jambalaya of international co-productions, partly because of the inroads of television aesthetics, and partly because of the cloistered aestheticism of self-conscious art-house cinema. The greatness of “The Secret Agent” is in its self-transcending realism—an aesthetic that’s as daring in its details as it is inconspicuous in its compositional refinement. This is an art not of depiction but of revelation. “Misericordia” is similarly a seismic art, of a world of apparent order trembling eruptively with the force of desire. Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” set in Lusaka, Zambia, is a work of fervently critical realism that subtly but decisively shifts its tone, at crucial moments, to the symbolic realm. “The Empire” is one of the year’s most outlandishly imaginative films. Bruno Dumont pursues a harshly realistic exploration of small-town politics, romance, and family life on the northern coast of France by the most unexpected means possible—of a “Star Wars” parody featuring the war between good and evil, involving a pair of massive vessels, one below the sea, the other in the sky.

I grudgingly include “Nouvelle Vague,” Richard Linklater’s superb off-Hollywood film, which—and I say this with affection—could as easily have been made on a studio backlot as on the computer-doctored streets of Paris. Yet the upside is the inclusion, with an easy conscience, of the American director Rob Tregenza’s Norwegian film “The Fishing Place,” which is mainly in Norwegian and German and which is among the most aesthetically accomplished and psychologically intricate Second World War films of recent years, a worthy companion to Lou Ye’s woefully underrated “Saturday Fiction.” And, again, worth noting that Sophie Fillières’s “This Life of Mine,” had it been released here last year, would have been on this list.

Documentary Feature Film

The system is screwed up: the Academy grants eligibility to documentaries yet unreleased here if they’ve won a festival prize or have been nominated by their country for Best International Feature. “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” opened yesterday, and “Natchez” opens January 30th; if neither is nominated this year, will they be eligible next year, on the basis of their 2026 release dates? Both “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” and “Suburban Fury” are one-on-one interview films, drastically different in subject and in method, but similar in their directors’ bold, necessity-driven originality in their approach to the format. “Afternoons of Solitude,” in which the director Albert Serra followed the torero Andrés Roca Rey through three years of bullfights, is an observational film that, by means of precise and probing camerawork and a deftly handled relationship between the filmmaker and the bullfighter, redefines the very nature of cinematic observation while also providing a view of the sport that, horrific as it may be, also exalts its mortal glories. ♦

One of the promotional images for the film “Two People Exchanging Saliva” is a black-and-white closeup of a woman, her face bruised, her nose bleeding, her eyes slack with ecstasy. What are we to make of the feelings that this woman stirs in us: the reflexive response of distress, and then a more cultivated, and therefore repressed, curiosity? What could hurt so good? The film is a fable about intimacy and consumerism set in a dystopian version of Paris where romantic touch, especially the kiss, is forbidden, punishable by death. The citizen in you laughs heartily as this film, a tragicomedy, skewers the hypocrisies and ironies of the repressed West. But the lover inside also aches: the directors, Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, suspend us in a state of desire and longing, the thwarted kind.

Since 2021, the Galeries Lafayette, the luxury department store in Paris, has invited filmmakers to use its interiors at night. Singh and Musteata, who are partners in both work and life, exploit the aesthetic of the boutique, a severe geometric glamour, for their Buñuel-esque story of bourgeois sadness. The film is told in chapters. The first is called “Le Jeu” (“The Game”). A narrator, voiced by the Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps, her voice not godlike but instead melancholic and playful, introduces us to Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), a naïf shopgirl with sparkling eyes, counter to the meaning of her name. (Everyone in this bleak world is named after different states of bad humor.) Malaise will turn twenty-five soon. She is ill-fated, the narrator suggests. Malaise notices a customer, the beautiful Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi)—angina, in English, a reference to diseases of the heart—wandering soullessly through the department store, and she persuades the other woman to play a game.

The salesperson and her customer. The plain act of shopping gives cover to the instant attraction. The time to pay comes, and we receive a shock. Malaise carefully slips on a bejewelled glove and slaps Angine repeatedly. Currency in a shadowy world that condemns intimacy as animal and grotesque—“two people exchanging saliva” is another way to describe kissing—is violence. To be bruised is to be among the upper crust; Malaise’s co-workers feign status, outside of work, with painted-on bruises. The brutality of conformism, the draining of romantic love, the disavowal of human eroticism and desire—these are the tenets of the society that Singh and Musteata have drawn, with an impish humor, a society that must smell rank, given the interdiction against clean teeth.

But that slap. A punishment, a payment, a seduction, all at once. I could wax on about the allusive power of the film, its potential for mirroring our own sick societies. But what most interests me in this unnerving work is the slapping. Nothing in cinema is purer than the face. The camera’s love of the face is the medium’s original affair. And so the slap causes a visual distortion, and a spiritual betrayal—the camera running riot against its love object. “Two People Exchanging Saliva” rewrites the slap, making it akin to a kiss. Angine desperately returns to the store, again and again, to get her fix from Malaise, her face reddening from blood just below the surface, a canvas of her awakened desire. She had sleepwalked through her genteel married life, with a taciturn husband, called Chagrin, who is in the business of coffin-making—for all those unfortunate souls who could not live without the kiss.

The 2026 Oscar nominations were announced on Thursday, and two New Yorker films were named among the contenders. “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” a satire about attraction and repression in a dystopian Paris, is nominated for Best Live Action Short, while “Retirement Plan,” about a working man’s dreams for after his career ends, will compete for Best Animated Short. Should a New Yorker nominee win, March’s awards ceremony will mark the second consecutive year in which a film released by the magazine has received an Academy Award.

“Two People Exchanging Saliva,” written and directed by Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, was inspired in part by the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement in Iran, and by the rise of the far right in the U.S. Executive-produced by Julianne Moore and Isabelle Huppert, the film imagines a world where slaps to the face have replaced currency, and kissing is illegal—and punishable by death. When a young woman, Malaise, starts working at a glamorous boutique, she develops a quick connection with a wealthy customer, Angine, igniting the envy of her supervisor. “We wanted to tell a female-led story that uses humor and imagination to reflect this moment in which the line between the ridiculous and the horrific has collapsed,” the filmmakers wrote. The story depicts “two women whose tenderness toward one another shows how an act of love—even a single kiss—can become an act of resistance.”

“Retirement Plan,” directed by John Kelly and co-written by Kelly and Tara Lawall, rests on a straightforward structure—a man’s list of ambitions for life after he stops working. And yet, in the film’s seven minutes, that list, narrated by the actor Domhnall Gleeson, takes viewers on a journey, humorously illustrating necessary tasks, aspirational hobbies—hiking, bird-watching, yoga—and life-enriching activities for which he imagines he’ll finally have time. “It feels surreal that ‘Retirement Plan’ has found such momentum,” Kelly said. “Perhaps the most surprising thing has been the emotional responses, with many people telling us how watching made them reëvaluate their lives.”

In addition to The New Yorker’s nominated films, four additional films released by the magazine—“Extremist,” “Rovina’s Choice,” “Cashing Out, and “Last Days on Lake Trinity”—had been short-listed by the Academy for this year’s awards. The nominees hope to match the Oscar victory at last year’s ceremony by The New Yorker’s “I’m Not a Robot,” a dark comedy about technology that claimed the prize for Best Live Action Short. “Stutterer,” released by the magazine in 2016, won that year’s award for Best Live Action Short.

In total, twenty-one New Yorker films have now received Academy Award nominations, including the two that went on to win. You can watch the magazine’s full library of short films at newyorker.com/video, and on the magazine’s YouTube channel.

To receive future New Yorker films in your inbox, along with movie reviews, Profiles of actors and directors, and additional coverage of the entertainment industry, sign up for the daily newsletter. ♦

I’m so excited to see you this weekend! It’s been way too long. What’s that? Oh, yeah, totally. Of course you can bring your husband along.

I actually love when your husband joins us. Sure, it was just going to be the two of us, but now it’s going to be the three of us, by which I mean that it’ll be the two of you, plus me. Which is great, because you and I did all the logistical planning, and now your husband gets to benefit from our efforts while also adding his belated two cents about how “we should have gone to that new steak place” and “we can’t stay out too late because of work tomorrow.” Which is such a good point, even though we’re meeting at noon.

No, really, making small talk with your life partner is a wonderful way for me to practice my conversational skills. It’s fun when he goes on and on about his boring and seemingly evil corporate job, which I can’t comment on, of course, because then you two will get into a fight about it later and blame me. Seriously, it’s electrifying how many third rails exist whenever he’s around, such as politics, or any subject that doesn’t revolve around him. And when he’s being condescending about some of our favorite topics, such as “The Real Housewives,” it’s exciting to feel like it’s our job to steer the conversation back to his interests.

I also love the way he never asks me any questions, as if he’s playing a one-man improv game in which he can only communicate through declarative statements.

Honestly, I was hoping to be vulnerable and discuss some difficult personal stuff with you, but you know what? That can wait. It’s not like it took us five months to find this time to meet up. What’s a few more hundred days to receive the support I could really use right now? Or I guess I could open up with your husband sitting there, while he half-listens and checks e-mail on his phone. I’m thrilled to have my private life be fodder for your gossip on the drive home. And this way we can forgo the illusion that you’re not repeating what I share to your spouse anyway, and I can experience firsthand his dismissive and belittling takes on my life choices.

I’m not trying to be rude, but doesn’t your husband have friends he could spend time with while we hang out? Oh, he never makes his own plans? Really? Cool, cool. Well, then, let me just say that it’s genuinely an honor to help solve the male-loneliness epidemic, one husband at a time. I feel privileged to be a part of the solution by letting your spouse cosplay friendship for an afternoon. Really, I should be expressing my gratitude to you and your husband for letting me be a part of the change I wish to see.

In fact, I will express my gratitude. At the end of the hang, I’ll be sure to thank the two of you for the lovely outing. I might even say, “We should do this again some time!,” owing to my people-pleasing tendencies, which I’ll spend the next few weeks working through in therapy. I love leaving a get-together with my dear friend feeling vaguely extraneous and heartwrenchingly nostalgic for a time in our lives when including partners in absolutely every activity wasn’t the norm.

But yes! Definitely bring him along. I can’t wait. ♦